


Red, I feel my soul on fire

by SomeEnchantedEve



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-12
Updated: 2012-03-12
Packaged: 2017-11-01 20:12:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/360777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeEnchantedEve/pseuds/SomeEnchantedEve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the gotexchange comment meme, found here: http://gotexchange-mod.livejournal.com/1067.html</p><p>Prompt was: Jaime/Catelyn and/or Jaime/Sansa, Jaime has a secret thing for redheads. </p><p>'“Pretty,” he says, and she laughs, she’s laughing at him and he likes that, she’s far more spirited than her sister and he likes that too, it suits her to have a fiery personality to go with that fiery hair. '</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red, I feel my soul on fire

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: 'Jaime/Catelyn and/or Jaime/Sansa, Jaime has a secret thing for redheads.'
> 
> Somehow I made that into angst! XD 
> 
> Title is from Les Miserables 'Red and Black'

He keeps it locked deep, a secret he barely whispers to himself, but Jaime likes his sister best when the setting sun kisses all the colors of dusk across her in his bed, when she is bathed in purple and orange and red. Red, most of all. 

He’s always had a thing, truly, for red hair. 

(He can never, ever, _ever_ tell Cersei.) 

It’s less common than the other colors, after all, and if he’s learned anything from his father ( _a Lannister always pays his debts our name lives on hear me roar_ ) it’s that rare things are valuable and worth owning, and worth owning more than anyone else, because it always comes in handy, in the end, to have more – just more, of everything, all the time. 

He could have had one, a redheaded Tully bride, sweet and unassuming and pliable as she’d been. But glory and honors had been the rarity he’d sought, then, and he’d longed for the red of blood and battle instead of something softer between his fingers (and of course, there had been Cersei, there had always been Cersei). 

And besides, it is her sister Catelyn’s hair that he catches between his fingers, looping it around his glove and she raises an eyebrow. 

“Pretty,” he says, and she laughs, she’s laughing at him and he likes that, she’s far more spirited than her sister and he likes that too, it suits her to have a fiery personality to go with that fiery hair. 

Maybe he would have married that redheaded Tully girl, if it had ever been an option, if she had not been promised to a man in the North (but probably not, if he is being honest with himself, still that call of blood and battle). 

Years pass and the seasons change and he’s going North with his sister the queen, and it is exactly as desolate and barren as he had imagined (everything is muted in grey and blue and Jaime holds with brighter colors). 

Catelyn Stark is a beautiful woman – nowhere near as beautiful as Cersei, but being as beautiful as Cersei is a feat that no woman Jaime has ever met has managed, but she’s still lovely and she still has all that red hair. It’s bled into the Starks now, he sees, the children have the Tully look, and the luckier they are for it, in Jaime’s opinion there is no need for ladies and lads who look like Eddard Stark, always so solemn and long-faced. 

Her girl ( _his_ girl, Ned Stark’s girl, is all that matters in Robert’s mind) is to be Joffrey’s bride and she is flawless, if her mother is copper than she is porcelain, all the small imperfections carefully smoothed away. Her hair is red, too, brighter, burnished, blinding. 

How beautiful, he thinks, and how quickly she shall break. 

(He is right, but she will mend and meld into something stronger.) 

Catelyn Stark is less beautiful when he sees her in the dimness of his captivity, grief and war written along the curve of her cheek, but what little light filters through catches on the red in her hair, and really, he isn’t at his best either. He’s only ever, in his life, been with Cersei but he’s drunk enough and desperate enough to have her, and perhaps guilty enough, too. 

_Sometimes you can fuck away your pain, you know,_ he wants to tell her. _Take it from someone who knows all too well._ And her hair is still red, after all. 

In the end he doesn’t, doesn’t have to, she sets him free anyway with promises drawn at sword tip, and maybe there is a little regret in that, for him, maybe it would have been nice, for both of them, to feel a little pleasure in this world so determined to deny it to them. 

When the dust settles and the battles are done, singers will call Sansa Stark a goddess of spring in those songs she has long forgotten the tunes and words to, but Jaime Lannister knows her to be a lady of winter, she is a Stark, after all, for all that she is crowned with Tully red. 

A Stark, he swears his sword anyway. 

My last chance at honor, he thinks, and lays his sword at her feet and thinks to see that little girl from Winterfell, a budding beauty on the cusp of womanhood, a flower to bloom in the South. 

She is more beautiful, more terrible, so much more _grown_ than he had expected, he had thought to save a child but swears himself, instead, to a lady. 

Her eyes are serious, solemn ( _there is some Ned Stark in her after all_ , he thinks) and do nothing to betray her thoughts. “You do me honor, ser,” she says, but her voice is flat. A Lannister’s honor, still, apparently, does not count for much, and Jaime’s credit has always been the worst of them all no matter which direction he turns, no matter where he swings his sword. 

A wind stirs her hair, and he remembers that ugly drab brown it was, the day she was recovered, and he is glad she has cast that aside. _Red,_ he wants to tell her, _red is always better, rarer._

“You give me honor, my lady,” he answers honestly, and wonders what she would do, if he looped a lock of that bright copper hair over his finger, would she be still so measured and quiet or would she laugh, instead. 

_Always more. More of everything._

Empires rise and fall, years pass and things change, everything changes but Jaime still has a fondness for red hair, he finds.


End file.
